Does Sleeping With Many Women Cut Your Risk of Cancer?

They call it “notch count.” It calls up images of gunfighters, who would carve a notch in the handle of their guns for every person they killed. If you’re keeping notches on your bedpost to mark your conquests, the more notches you have, the better your sex life. But does having sex with many women actually prove anything?

We heard from one reader who had a lot to say on the subject. Remember that old joke? “I’m tired of double standards. A woman who sleeps with hundreds of men is a slut. But if a man does it… he’s gay.” Ha ha ha, right? But it turns out there is actually some consequences for being promiscuous as a woman versus as a man, and we don’t really understand why the results are what they are.

Well, anyway, our friend had this today:

I knew this girl and I really wanted to date her. I mean, she was so incredibly sexy. She had a taut, flat stomach. She had an incredible ass. She had legs that went on for days. She had a plentiful rack. And she had a cute face. She was the whole package. She was everything I ever thought was sexy in a woman. When she moved you could see that sexy shake, that wiggle, that means this was a woman who knows her way around her body. She used to drink at this bar I went to. So every weekend I would see her and chat her up, and I would ask her out.

She told me that she liked me and that I seemed like a nice guy. She told me that she would love for something to happen between us, but it just was never going to, and I had better get used to it. I asked around again and again to see if anybody else was seeing her, but everybody I talked to said no. I never saw her with anybody. She wasn’t married and she wasn’t attached. So I couldn’t figure out why she wouldn’t go out with me. I wanted her so bad that I decided I had better get aggressive.

She always took the bus and one night I bought her a bunch of drinks. I got her to stay too long. and then when the last bus had left, she realized her mistake. She was also pretty tipsy. So I offered to drive her home.

We drove out of there and I took her like a mile out of the way. I started putting the moves on her. She let me. We were making out pretty hot and heavy when she stopped me, said it was a mistake. I admit I got kind of upset. I told her that if she didn’t want to have sex with me, she could walk home. She nodded, got out of the car, and did just that.

Well, the next weekend, I did the same thing. I couldn’t believe she would fall for the same trick twice, but she seemed to want to tempt herself. I wondered if maybe she was testing me. So I went through the motions and, when the last bus had left, I drove her home. But instead of home I took her three miles out of the way. And again I told her she could sleep with me or she could walk home. Again she told me she would walk. She got out of my car and she did.

Well, the next weekend, I told her I was sorry and that I would finally give her a ride home. But instead of taking her home I took her five miles away from home. It was raining. When I told her she had to put out or walk, she just took off her clothes and we had the most amazing sex I’ve ever had in my life.

Afterward I asked her why she was so resistant. It obviously wasn’t her first time. She said, “Look, I like you. I was willing to walk a mile, even three. But I’ll be damned if I walk home five miles in the rain just to keep you from getting chlamydia.”

Ha ha, right?

A study in Canada found not long ago that a man who has had sex with 20 or more women has almost a 30 percent lower risk of getting prostate cancer than a man who has had sex with just one woman (say, a man who got married to his childhood sweetheart and never had sex with anyone else). Other studies have found a link between more frequent ejaculation and a reduced risk of prostate cancer, it’s probably true that the more women you’ve had sex with, the more regularly you get off, and again the more often you ejaculate. Hence the lower risk. Promiscuity itself is probably not a cure against anything and, in fact, increases your risk of getting an STD. And sex with twenty or more men is actually more risky for a man if he is gay. Gay men who had sex with 20 or more partners actually had a huge increase in risk for prostate cancer, according to the study. Nobody’s really sure why.

But really, the impact of sleeping with a lot of men or a lot of women is cultural and emotional. You know that dreaded conversation that every man has with his woman. It’s the, “How many women/men have you slept with” conversation. It’s said that men sometimes inflate the number to sound more experienced, and women lie about the number and make it smaller to sound less slutty. Or women change the definition of “sex” so that they come out looking better off than they really are in terms of how many people they have slept with.

Ultimately, your notch count or lack thereof is something you have to live with. In your partner, it’s something you have to accept (or not). But ultimately if you want to sleep around, you should, and if you don’t want to, you shouldn’t. That’s what it means to be a living, breathing, sexual adult in a free society. We all are just looking for what will make us happy.